The Magnitsky Act is another proven tool to push back against Russian human rights abusers, and it is right to extend its application to those people involved in persecuting, poisoning and arresting Alexei Navalny. It is not a question of new laws, but of enforcing existing legislation, as the United States did when it designated the GRU and two of its specific officers, the FSB, three research institutes and five Russian government officials linked to the use of a chemical weapon in contravention of international law for the nerve agent attacks on Navalny and the Skripals. These attacks have brought home to some Western leaders that they, too, are under threat. One German politician told me plainly, that ‘it’s only the door of my house that separates me from Putin’s assassins. No one is protecting me.’
When respected Western politicians sat on the boards of Putin’s companies, notorious for their corrupt schemes and for pilfering from the Russian budget, it made it harder to go after these organisations. Most prominent among them was the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. At the end of his term in office in 2005, Schröder agreed to become head of the shareholders’ committee of the Nord Stream consortium, the natural gas pipeline project linking Russia to Germany, which he had helped launch a matter of weeks earlier. Schröder later became chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG, as well as chairman of the board of Rosneft when the company was already under sanctions for its role in the conflict in Ukraine. The purpose of Nord Stream was to bypass traditional transit countries, such as Ukraine and Poland, to funnel Russian Arctic gas supplies under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany. The project was controversial from the outset, notably for the central role played by long-term Putin ally and former Stasi agent, Matthias Warnig. Critics warned that the pipeline would open the door for Putin to threaten the curtailment of gas supplies to Ukraine and Poland without endangering supplies in the West, a particularly vindictive means of coercion. So, the decision in the wake of the Ukraine invasion to block Nord Stream marked a substantial turning point.
I have long felt there is a dearth of strong Western leadership. But the recent decisions to freeze assets, not just of those Russians who take part in operations directly against the United States, but also those who fight the free press, who violate human rights and take part in corruption, will have a real impact. Enforcing sanctions is crucial, but it is vital to apply them alongside developmental goals, supporting the people within Russia who are seeking to make a positive difference. The Kremlin’s attempt to insulate the Russian people from the truth about the war in Ukraine risks turning Russia into another North Korea, with a population hermetically sealed from the outside world. This must not be allowed to happen. Cultural and scientific exchanges, assistance in education and the raising of the new generation must be maintained where possible, as only this will help to build the civil society of the future. No matter how well intentioned those who suggested imposing sanctions in the fields of culture, education and science might have been, this is not sensible in the longer term; once the war is over and Ukrainian sovereignty has been guaranteed, it will be vital to restore cultural ties between Russia, Europe and the broader West in the future. If this does not happen, the West will struggle to show itself to be an ally of the Russian people, rather than simply a force determined to topple its government.
CHAPTER 20
YOU ARE NOT SAFE
At the beginning of July 2018, along with many people in the United Kingdom, I opened my newspaper to discover headlines about a middle-aged couple in the southern English city of Salisbury who had fallen mysteriously ill. Four months earlier, Salisbury had been the scene of the attempted assassination by Kremlin agents of a former Russian military intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and the British media were already making a connection between the two events. As someone with first-hand experience of Vladimir Putin’s methods, I knew this did not make sense. In the minds of Putin’s regime, Skripal was a legitimate target – a person who had expressed his disgust at the men running his homeland by cooperating with the British; but the couple in the latest story had no involvement with Russia or indeed with politics of any sort. Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were in their mid-40s, unemployed and existing on the fringes of British society. Dawn, who was a mother of three children, had a history of drug abuse and she and Charlie were living in hostels for the homeless. The couple were known to scavenge in litter bins and recycling containers. Why on earth would Vladimir Putin select them as targets for his hit squads?
In the weeks that followed, the terrible truth emerged. On the morning of Sunday, 30 June, Dawn Sturgess had unexpectedly collapsed. An ambulance was called and Dawn was taken to hospital. Later that day, Charlie Rowley fell ill and he too was rushed to hospital. Dawn’s condition worsened and she fell into a coma. The doctors decided she could not be saved and, on 8 July, her life support system was switched off. When Wiltshire Police concluded that foul play was involved, the story became national news. Two days later, Charlie regained consciousness. The hospital reported that he was no longer in a critical condition, but his health had been severely impaired; an unknown substance had inflicted serious damage on the functioning of his central nervous system.
Charlie told the police officers who came to see him that he had discovered a bottle of Nina Ricci perfume in a charity shop bin. After they opened it and Dawn sprayed herself with the contents, they had begun to experience symptoms of dizziness and nausea. When blood samples from Dawn and Charlie were sent for analysis to the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, it became clear that they – like Sergei Skripal and his daughter before them – had been poisoned by the Novichok nerve agent. The BBC reported that police were working on the hypothesis that the fake Nina Ricci bottle had been left over from the attack on the Skripals and had been disposed of ‘in a haphazard way’.
It all made sense. The agents sent by Vladimir Putin to murder a former Russian intelligence operative had assumed their job was done and had simply thrown away a vial of deadly poison, with no regard for the harm it could do to the person who might stumble across it. As it happened, that person was Dawn Sturgess, an innocent woman completely unconnected to the Machiavellian world of the Kremlin, a mother, a friend, a partner, a precious human soul. When Charlie gave her the Nina Ricci perfume, it is easy to imagine how happy it would have made her, how delighted Dawn would have been with such a show of affection. But it would be the cause of their terrible fate.
The unmitigated cynicism of Putin’s regime was demonstrated by its response to the global outrage at its actions. By early September, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – the body that polices compliance with the International Chemical Weapons Convention – had concluded that the Novichok that killed Dawn Sturgess was from the same batch used against the Skripals, and the British police revealed that the two suspects in both cases were serving members of the Russian special services. The Kremlin, as was to be expected, denied any involvement in the attacks – it could hardly do otherwise – but at the same time, it gave Russian state media the go-ahead to glory in its murderous deeds.
The state television station, Channel One, sneered that the accusations against the Russian special services were ‘the usual British Russophobia’, but simultaneously boasted that the Kremlin would always hunt down ‘traitors’ such as Sergei Skripal. ‘Being a traitor to the Motherland … is one of the most hazardous professions,’ gloated the presenter of the evening news, Kirill Kleimenov. ‘Whether you are a professional traitor or you just burn with hatred for your mother country, I would warn you very strongly not to flee to England. There’s obviously something wrong over there – there have been lots of examples … so many strange incidents when people get hanged or poisoned, or they die in helicopter crashes and fall mysteriously out of windows.’